Cat Black Jazz Attack
“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”― Wallace Stegner
Under the heading: maybe San Francisco is not completely dead yet (at least culturally). Last night by invitation of some dear friends, Barb and I ventured into the city for our debut trip to Black Cat. A jazz club set in the heart of the ever-poor, ever-rank Tenderloin, Black Cat was opened some six years ago (where the hell have I been?) by restaurateur and music freak Fritz Quattlebaum. What Quattlebaum has created in the cellar of his establishment is a marvel: a modern take on the classic bop-fortified 60s jazz venue, dark and velvety with rhinestone skulls hanging off the leather booth-framed walls, pictures of jazz ancestors peering through the columns at the abstract expressionistic paintings in the back. All blending into a setting vibe for the main event that happens multiple times a night on the grand-pianoed center stage.
Black Cat is the ultimate Jazz Workshop, right out of the Charles Mingus handbook to happiness, each week offering up an artist residency, where musicians have the opportunity to workshop their craft for four concurrent nights, sometimes swapping out players and genres, having space for creation in front of a receptive audience sipping the finest in champagne margaritas, adoring being an accessory of the experiential artistic canvas. Artists have room to breathe on the stage of Black Cat. It is about growing….given room to expand…grabbing the inspired molecules from the air to mold—to birth—new sonic sounds and voyages.
Kassa Overall and band are on the stage this week. With an upcoming record on Warp, Overall is a Seattle native who is becoming known for his innovative style of mixing jazz and afro-Cuban and hip hop and and electronic and moon-walking sounds from behind his band-leading trap set. For the residency, he presented a five-piece ensemble, featuring a pianist, second percussionist, stand-up bass and a horn player/third percussionist…who happens to be Tomoki Sanders, the 23-year-old son of Phaoroh Sanders.
Last night Overall led the band through two sets of musical alchemy, joking with the crowd between songs, while blowing minds with the ensuing performances. Both sets included a newer song called “Lava is Calm” which takes a page from the Art Ensemble of Chicago songbook with a song structure that trenchantly breaks from a slow groove into free jazz insanity…all masterfully played by the quintet. Overall thrives in his command of the organism, conducting his band on the fly with unexpected directive arrangements that the musicians enthusiastically feed on. The pianist Ian Finkelstein showcases throughout his organic Herbie Hancock-on-loop, commanding riffs & drops—providing an epic flavor to the rhythmic-heavy sauce (the guy is a monster player), while Benji Allonce adds ambient percussion bliss and local groover Giulio Xavier Cetto sweeps the foundation with his stand-up bass slapping. And then there is Tomoki Sanders, a budding star metamorphosizing between the smoke and dark club-light, debuting a soprano saxophone that he has just acquired, channeling his ancestors through his breaths.
Deep into the second set, Overall walked us into his bands’ cover of John Coltrane’s Naima. Reminding the audience of the history of the song (it was the name of Coltrane’s first wife that his more famous wife Alice would end up accompanying him on during the later years), he called out Finkelstein to open it up with a new, soulful solo introduction. The band came in like a flame lighting-up a cherry jubilee, with Sanders connecting with history as he blew his new saxophone to the melody his father had once played with Trane at the Village Vanguard so long ago. A night out became historic.
As intended, last night Black Cat became a sonic time and space bender, where the new sound of jazz connected with all that had come before it, prophesying all that was to follow, demanding beauty in city that has become known for losing its footing as an artistic center. How did it take me so long to find my way there?
Kassa Overall and band will be playing through the weekend. I am sure they will just get better and better as the sets go on….
Who Was Pablo Neruda and Why Is His Death a Mystery?
Who DOESN’T know who Pablo Neruda was ??? “After a decade-long investigation, a team of forensic experts issued their final report on the exhumed remains of the acclaimed Chilean poet. Here’s why there are so many questions around his death.” (thanks for the article, Jon Blaufarb)
Jake Bongiovi Joins Tom Everett Scott in Hair Band Comedy ‘Rockbottom’
Cheers to my friend Noam Dromi for the feature film he is the midst of making!
“I’m Going to Learn How to Make My Own Kind of Life”: On Vashti Bunyan’s “Wayward”
My kids grew up listening to Just Another Diamond Day thanks to Vashti Bunyan’s rediscovery helped out by Vetiver’s Andy Cabic and Revolver’s Gary Held. This biography looks like a great read and insight into the great English folk scene.
Authorities Recover 100-Year-Old Dalí Drawings Stolen in Barcelona Art Heist
“Police have detained three brothers, aged 50, 53 and 55, who allegedly targeted homes in Barcelona’s high-end neighboorhoods that held fine art and luxury goods. The robbery ring has been under investigation since January 2022 as part of operation ‘Gresca,’ and, on Friday, police announced that a trove of stolen jewelry and banknotes and art, including two 100-year-old illustrations by Dalí, were seized from the suspect’s hideout.”
Colorado distillery wins 'Best American Whiskey' award at prestigious event
I need to get a bottle of Storm King whisky. And while I am at it, also some Breckenridge whisky that won the award for best blended (ALSO from Colorado).
I am 100% looking forward to the Casablanca Records bio-pic. I am not sure if there is a label (I am sure there is) whose drug-addled crazed yet super successful is as legendary.
The Rolling Stones share short film about their famous mobile recording studio
Oh yeah….
Trouble Deaf Heaven
BY BIN RAMKE
Sonnet 29
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the world? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.
What makes happiness? Nothing.
What makes an ending? What does not.
What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,
of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full
daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.
Max Walter Svanberg
What makes a question? Birds in the evening.
When do birds die? When it is complete.
What makes a world? The leaves shimmer in the wind, they
reverberate with small heat and large wind and they cannot be counted.
What is music? A man lives there with his sister, they count the buses passing
their window, and they count the small-winged insects which die on that
windowsill.
Who is happy? Nothing is necessary, everything that is is.
When does it end? A green delight the wounded mind endears
After the hustling world is broken off.
John Clare
What is the beginning? The completion.
How does it complicate? In that it dazzles.
When does it matter? Blue loaves of dusk.
Who perishes?
Who listens? There will be prizes.
What is a child? Blue lives of dusk.
Where does dust come from? From tropical skies.
When is it over?...into childhood...into fantasy...through the streets of New
York...through tropical skies....into the receiving trays the balls come to rest
releasing prizes.
Joseph Cornell
What does a child do? Listens with his body, with her body.
When does it end? Listens with the hands.
Does it end? The hands which are small and wide.
Where do children come from? White pebbles.
Who suffers? No one returns from there.
Who suffers? There was once a small forest with a path of white pebbles
and a tame group of frights and follies; whoever entered knew
the path would carry them to the other side, but that it would be
scary and fun at the same time. No one who entered was ever seen again.
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
Who listens? The large lady with the small dog, she leans into the
neighbor's yard to sniff the hydrangea once more hoping
this time it will have an odor, a sweetness which she feels
such a desperate need for she is near despair, she is thinking
of killing herself except who would care for the dog, who could know
what he feels what he needs what his smelly bed in the corner actually
means to him.
What matters? There is a forest.
Who listens? Another theory of the origin of the universe holds that
"matter" is a way of thinking, a little like love, actually, if you think
of it that way.
What matters? There is a forest.
What is the word? There is color, and no one know what to do with it.
We would be happier without it is one theory; we are irresponsible
and full of angers like colors.
What does the child think? The child.
What does the child think? Happiness.
What child? A word is a small part of itself, it is round at times, and it satisfies
only itself.
Does it answer? It does not.
What is pain? A small island, or perhaps it is a large island, the adjective is
merely relative and a convenience. There are a few inhabitants—one,
actually, ever at a time—and the sky's red would perhaps be beautiful if
there were another even a single other inhabitant, alas.
What is pain? A man turns and locks his door with exactly the same small
dance of hands every morning at the same hour and pockets the key
followed by a pat of the pocket with the hand which just locked the
door. Unknown to him it is his life, it is the center and source of what
he calls his life. It makes him what he is happy to call happy.
Who suffers? Oh, it is true, there are causes of cruelty, it is that kind of world.
What is geometry? It is how we know, and what.
What is the purpose of memory? Blue lines of dust.
What is the cat when she yawns?
What is dust?
Does the child suffer? The child is suffering.
Is the child cruel? The child crushes the world at will, the child destroys
with angelic decorum, the child bleeds into his own drinking water
and smiles to see color a demon and delirium the child is born knowing
and screaming and there is pain in his fist when he enters and there is
pain as if the atoms which whirl mad in their completeness were tiny
childbirths and it is the cruelty of children which presses upon the
innocent earth and coal turns to diamond.
What is to perish?
What is to choose?
What is to crush?
